Tag Archives: culture

The graphic was created for a t-shirt design, but quickly turned up on 4chan as a blank image macro template. Apparently the creator, Sam Smith, was happy to see his work being used, and applied a Creative Commons licence.

Japan has always been on the forefront of cutting edge robotics. Its roots can be traced back 200-300 years during the Edo period when skilled craftsmen created automata (self-operating machines). Using nothing more than pulleys and weights they were able to make the Karakuri (Japanese automata) perform amazing tasks.

Japan’s modern day robots can be traced back to the Karakuri. Today Hideki Higashino is one of the few remaining craftsmen who is determined to keep the history and tradition of Japanese Karakuri alive.

INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.

The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.

Written and Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today’s pop culture.

“Influencers” belongs to the new generation of short films, webdocs, which combine the documentary style and the online experience.

Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. In fact, I’ve been experiencing #3 for about the last hour:

The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation. During this time the individual will have several windows open, generally several browser ‘tabs,’ a Microsoft Word document in some state of incompletion, the individual’s own Facebook page as well as that of another randomly-selected individual who may or may not be on the ‘friends’ list, 2-5 Gchat conversations that are no longer immediately active, possibly iTunes and a ‘client’ for Twitter. The individual will switch between the open applications/tabs in a fashion that appears organized but is functionally aimless, will return to reading some kind of ‘blog post’ in one browser tab and become distracted at the third paragraph for the third time before switching to the Gmail inbox and refreshing it again.

The behavior equates to mindlessly refreshing and ‘lozenging’ the same sources of information repeatedly. While performing this behavior the individual feels a sense of numb depersonalization, being calmly and pragmatically aware that they have no identifiable need to be at the computer nor are they gleaning any practical use from it at that moment, and the individual may feel vaguely uncomfortable or ashamed about this awareness in concert with the fact that they continue to perform the idle ‘refreshing’ behavior. They may feel increasingly anxious and needful, similar to the sensation of having an itch that needs scratching or a thirst that needs quenching, all while feeling as though they are calm or slightly bored.

It was an incredible experience, and we hadn’t even been “evacuated” to the second warehouse next door to watch Blade Runner yet. That happened at 9pm, and the atmosphere was electric — literally, in fact: a reproduction of the floodlit building featured during the movie’s climax was projected onto the huge warehouse’s right-hand wall as the film reached its crescendo, to cheers and applause. Two actors, in costume, were suspended in fixed positions at the top of the wall, recreating in real life what we were seeing on-screen.

Odeon, take note: THIS is how to get people off BitTorrent and into cinemas.

I find myself at this site every time I need a name for an Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age character, etc, but it's actually an incredible resource for writers of fantasy and science fiction works looking for not just character names, but place names, vehicle names, drink names, drug dames, disease names and many, many more.

Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF.

Storyspace 3 is a tool for writing and reading hypertext narrative, for fictional and nonfictional stories told with links. Long the tool of choice for serious hypertext writers, Storyspace now offers new features, new tools, and unmatched elegance for handling complex stories with ease.